Mark Klein, PhD

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October 2024. New podcast! We used NotebookLM to create a 5 minute long "deep dive podcast" on our paper High-Speed Idea Filtering With the Bag of Lemons:

October 2024. The cover story in this months' New Scientist magazine (How to rebuild democracy to truly harness the power of the people) prominently features our work on the Deliberatorium.

July 2024. New project! UM6P has approved multi-year funding for our research on crowd-scale deliberation technology. Our evolving system will be used to support Vision 2030, an initiative that engages the UM6P community's collective intelligence to develop the university.

May 2024. New paper! The medium is the message: toxicity declines in structured vs unstructured online deliberations has been published in World Wide Web journal.

February 2024. I am spending another Spring semester in the School for Collective Intelligence in Rabat Morocco. It's great here!

May 2023. The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance (which I contributed to) is coming out May 17th. Check it out, there's some interesting work in there.

April 2023. You can now download the open source version of the deliberatorium! Just click here. It does not have many of the features of the latest research code, but it's a great way to get started.

February 2023. I am spending another Spring semester in the School for Collective Intelligence in Rabat Morocco, where I am teaching a masters-level class on crowd computing, presenting an executive education workshop, carrying on my research, living in the kasbah des oudayas (a UNESCO World Heritage Site), and enjoying long interesting conversations with students, colleagues and visitors to the school.

November 2022. New paper! Eigenrating: A Technique for Increasing the Accuracy of Crowd-based Idea Filtering describes a way to increase the accuracy of crowd-based idea-filtering by applying dimensionality reduction to conventional (e.g. 1-5) idea ratings.

August 2022. New video! (17") on the deliberative survey, a next generation crowd-scale deliberation platform aimed at removing the need for user training and (via AI algorithms) radically reducing the need for human moderation.

August 2022. New grant! I have received a grant from NATO (sponsored by the NATO Innovation Hub and NATO CMRE) to enable collaborative decision-making about adopting new technologies.

March 2022. New paper! Klein, M. (2022). Crowd-Scale Deliberation For Complex Problems: A Progress Report. This working paper provides a deep dive into my most recent results.

February - June 2022. I spent Spring semester as a visiting professor at the School of Collective Intelligence in Morocco, where I gave a course on crowd computing, presented a two-day executive education seminar, and collaborated with other faculty.

May 2021 New paper! Klein, M. (2021). Crowd-Scale Deliberation for Group Decision-Making. In Handbook of Group Decision and Negotiation. This is a good general introduction to my work on deliberation.

2019 - 2022. The long dark COVID pandemic.

Sept-Nov 2018. I spent 3 months at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan, working on technology to support complex negotiations.

August 2018. New paper! A Utility Function Compiler for Complex Negotiations describes how complex (nonlinear) utility functions can be "compiled" so that utility function calculation is much (e.g. 70x) faster. This helps negotiating agents explore more possibilities and make better agreements,

July 2018. I hosted Professor Valentin Robu of Heriot-Watt University, for the next six weeks. We collaborated on the application of automated negotiation technology to energy-related problems.

May 2018. I spent 3 months at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan, working on the Automated Multi-Agent Supply Chain Negotiation project and exploring Tokyo.

January 2018. A blog post about the Deliberatorium just appeared in the PlaceSpeak blog. Check it out!

June 2017. New paper! Towards Crowd-Scale Deliberation discusses how crowds can produce more (pareto-) optimal outcomes than current collective decision-making approaches.

April 2017. A new article that highlights the Deliberatorium has appeared in The Walrus, a respected Canadian online magazine.

March 2017. I was a keynote speaker at the NIT International Symposium on Future Informatics, talking about how crowd computing systems can approach pareto-optimal collective decisions.

March 2017. I spent March and April in Japan as a visiting professor at Takayuki Ito's lab in the Nagoya Institute of Technology, teaching and doing research on social computing.

January 2017. New paper! Supporting Argumentation in Online Political Debate, appears in New Media and Society Journal.

December 2016. Our team won a grant from the Templeton Foundation for the Scholio project, whose goal is to develop technologies that enable greater "intellectual humility" in public discourse.

August 2016. I was a visiting research fellow at the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University, working on deliberation-centric social media analysis.

January 2016. I was featured in an article on collective intelligence in El Pais, Spain's pre-eminent national newspaper, as well as an interview (starting around minute 40) on the Spanish radio program Siglo 21.